Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Topic · Structured data and media
Product rich results and Google Images product annotations come from product structured data without Merchant Center, but the Shopping tab needs a Merchant Center feed (said at the event; Google's docs recommend feed and markup together for the widest eligibility). Because AI Mode answers detailed follow-up questions, Google added a few flexible Merchant Center attributes in 2026 instead of hundreds of narrow ones: question and answer, document link, related product, item group title, variant option and popularity rank; it now also stresses product highlights and key-value product details, and its help marks most of these as intended for conversational experiences such as AI Mode. Data quality matters more for AI and agents ('garbage in, garbage out'). Google Shopping crawls with Storebot-Google, which recrawls more often for prices and availability, validates feeds and crawls cart and checkout pages. Google said most new attributes can also be used from schema.org markup, but its Merchant Center help lists a schema.org property only for item_group_title. Google announced the conversational attributes in January 2026 and opened them to retailers globally at Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026; in testing with lululemon, brand-submitted attributes were used in 50% of relevant AI Mode product recommendations (Google's September 2026 post). Google's help sets the limits: up to 30 question-and-answer pairs per product, up to five PDF document links, and a popularity rank that is the merchant's own 0-100 ranking against its inventory, not a sales figure across shops. This builds on Day 2's merchant markup news, such as sale-price validity dates aligned with Merchant Center.
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Google Search displays product rich results from product structured data; it may also use the product data a merchant provides in Google Merchant Center, but Merchant Center is not required for them.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01glossary term Merchant Center
To appear in the Shopping tab of Google Search, a product must be submitted in Google Merchant Center; product structured data alone is not enough.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01glossary term Merchant Center
Product structured data can help Merchant Center in some cases, for example during data validation, but Merchant Center does not require it.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Google's Merchant Center feed specification is how millions of merchants send Google billions of product offers, which are used in Shopping ads, Search ads and organic search results.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Merchant Center
Product snippets in Google Search are powered by both shopping feeds and schema.org structured data.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Traditional shopping results use a small set of well-defined attributes because they take little screen space: title, image, price, perhaps star ratings, shipping cost and time, and return information; in the past that was sufficient.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Behind the visible attributes, small pieces of product data such as brand and UPC or other barcodes are very important for Google Shopping's query understanding, retrieval and ranking.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
In AI Mode, shoppers keep asking deeper, more nuanced follow-up questions about brands and products, so AI Mode must return much more detailed product information than classic shopping results needed.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Product data quality matters more than ever for AI ('garbage in, garbage out'), and even more for agents acting on behalf of consumers, because an agent with bad data cannot do the right thing.
“If the agent has bad data, it cannot do the right things.”
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
In 2026, a few months before the October event, Google added new Merchant Center feed attributes to help AI systems understand product nuances, prompted by feedback since 2025 from merchants worried whether AI experiences represented them correctly.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google announced the new conversational feed attributes at Google Marketing Live (GML) 2026; the recording also appears to name Google I/O.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google decided against adding hundreds of thousands of highly specific feed attributes, such as heel height for shoes or lens details for cameras, and instead added a few flexible ones that leave merchants in control.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google Shopping said highly prescriptive product data is a lot of hard work for merchants and is no longer needed for LLMs.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google added six Merchant Center feed attributes for AI shopping experiences: question and answer, documents, related products, item group title and variant option for variants, and popularity rank.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03glossary term Conversational attributes
The question and answer feed attribute lets a merchant or brand upload questions and answers relevant to a product, whether they come from the manufacturer or from consumers.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Merchants can now provide a document describing a product, such as a PDF manual, a spec sheet or the package contents, so that AI can work out what the product is about.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
The related products feed attribute describes accessories, parts and replacement products, answering frequent questions such as what else to buy with a printer.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Variant data in Google's feed specification used to be limited to basics such as colour and size; the new item group title and variant option attributes make it much more flexible.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Google added a popularity rank feed attribute because consumers want to know how well a product sells on a marketplace.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Product Q&A data lets AI answer very detailed questions, such as a kettle's temperature settings, capacity or keep-warm safety, that separate feed attributes could never represent; Google's example came from a real merchant's product.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google Shopping called rich data with light structure the AI sweet spot: a little structure that helps the AI system understand the data, not deep, highly nested, complex structures.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Most of the new conversational feed attributes were already available in schema.org, so Google ties them back to structured data and can use them from product markup as well as from feeds.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Google Shopping uses its own crawler, Storebot (Storebot-Google), instead of Googlebot because it needs fresh product information, prices, availability and shipping details and therefore crawls much more often.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02glossary term Storebot-Google
Storebot-Google is used to validate merchant feeds: when a feed gives a price, Google double-checks it on the merchant's site.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02
Storebot-Google also does deep crawls, for example of checkout pages, which do not belong in the search index; this is another reason it is kept separate from Googlebot.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02
Google now emphasises two existing Merchant Center attributes for AI, product highlights (a short bulleted list) and product detail (detailed specifications), and updated its Help Center guidance to say they help AI systems.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03glossary term Product highlights and product details
Instead of adding feed attributes for individual specifications such as connectivity, memory, camera settings or box contents, Google asks merchants to send them as key-value pairs in product detail, because merchants know best what matters.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Google works to make sure that what merchants can express in its shopping feeds can also be expressed in schema.org, adding vocabulary where schema.org lacks it, for example for product details.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google named the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), next to the Merchant Center feed, as an industry standard whose capabilities it also wants schema.org to cover.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Basic, well-specified product attributes such as price, brand and availability remain as important as ever for Google Shopping.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Rich, less structured product data that is not prescribed by Google, schema.org or any feed or data model is increasingly important, because the merchant or brand knows best what to provide.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
The bar for product data quality is higher than ever because agents and users need correct information: with wrong data an agent might buy the wrong product for a user.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google Shopping pointed to a Google holiday shopping blog post with early results from real merchants using the conversational attributes, and to the Merchant Center Help Center and schema.org for the attributes and properties.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google Shopping described product data for AI as early days in a fast-moving area, with many more changes to come.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google's Product structured data introduction says that providing both on-page structured data and a Merchant Center feed maximizes eligibility for shopping experiences and helps Google understand and verify the data; product snippets may take pricing from the feed when the markup lacks it.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Google's Merchant Center help says products and details crawled from an online store can show up on Google even when they are not marked up with schema.org or added in Merchant Center, and lists the Shopping tab among the places Merchant Center free listings appear.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Merchant Center's automatic item updates use structured data and other product data found on landing pages to fix price, sale price, availability and condition mismatches in a merchant's product data; Google says they do not replace regular feed updates.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
On 11 January 2026 Google announced 'dozens of new data attributes' in Merchant Center for conversational commerce on AI Mode, Gemini and Business Agent, to roll out first with a small group of retailers.
Publisher Google blog (11 January 2026)Annotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
At Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026 Google said retailers globally can now use conversational attributes in Merchant Center to reflect the more conversational way people search.
Publisher Google blog (20 May 2026)Annotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byglossary term Conversational attributes
Google's Merchant Center help marks the question_and_answer, document_link, related_product and popularity_rank attributes as primarily intended for conversational experiences such as AI Mode in Google Search.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03glossary term Conversational attributes
Merchant Center's question_and_answer attribute takes up to 30 question-and-answer pairs per product, each question and answer up to 1,000 characters and 10,000 characters in total, and must not contain prices, shipping, dates or the company name.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Merchant Center's document_link attribute takes up to five URLs of PDF documents about a product, such as manuals, user guides or assembly instructions, and the merchant must own the content licensing rights.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Merchant Center's popularity_rank is a 0-100 value the merchant assigns to rank a product's popularity, based on its recent sales, against the rest of its own inventory; it does not reflect user ratings.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Google's Merchant Center help says the StoreBot crawler goes through product detail, cart and checkout pages, can fill in checkout forms, and records price, shipping, availability, coupons and payment methods to verify the data merchants share in Merchant Center.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02glossary term Storebot-Google
Google's crawler list says robots.txt rules addressed to the Storebot-Google user agent affect all surfaces of Google Shopping, such as the Shopping tab in Google Search.
Publisher GoogleAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02glossary term Storebot-Google
Merchant Center's product_highlight attribute takes 2 to 100 highlights of up to 150 characters each that describe only the product itself, without promotional text, keywords or search terms.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03glossary term Product highlights and product details
Merchant Center's product_detail attribute takes up to 100 specifications, each a section name, attribute name and attribute value, and Google's help says clean key-value specifications improve product details on Google Shopping and AI-driven surfaces.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03glossary term Product highlights and product details
Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) on 11 January 2026 as an open standard for agentic commerce across discovery, buying and post-purchase support, co-developed with retailers and platforms and compatible with A2A, AP2 and MCP.
Publisher Google blog (11 January 2026)Annotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byglossary term Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Google's 16 September 2026 holiday shopping post says that in testing with lululemon, conversational attributes submitted by the brand were used 50% of the time in relevant product recommendations in AI Mode.
Publisher Google blog (16 September 2026)Annotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-03
Google's free listings help says crawled store products can appear on Google without markup or Merchant Center but does not say whether that includes the Shopping tab; for a shop that wants Shopping tab visibility, the stage rule that Merchant Center is required is the safe working assumption.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
For an online shop, Product structured data is enough for product rich results and Google Images product annotations, but the Shopping tab needs a Merchant Center feed too; keep feed and markup values identical, since Google can use the markup to validate the feed.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Google's January 2026 announcement spoke of 'dozens' of new Merchant Center attributes, while the Day 3 talk counted six; all six named on stage (question_and_answer, document_link, related_product, item_group_title, variant_option, popularity_rank) are in the Merchant Center product data specification as of 3 October 2026.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
On stage the popularity rank was framed as how well a product sells on a marketplace, but Google's documentation defines it as the merchant's own 0-100 ranking against the rest of its inventory: a self-reported, relative value, not a sales figure across shops.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
As of 3 October 2026 Google's Merchant Center help lists no schema.org property for question_and_answer, document_link, related_product, popularity_rank, variant_option or product_detail (only item_group_title maps, to ProductGroup.name), and Search Central does not document such markup: reading these attributes from schema.org is a stage statement, the feed is the documented route.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Treat Storebot-Google separately from Googlebot in robots.txt and bot protection: a shop that blocks it on product, cart or checkout paths can undermine Shopping price and availability checks, even when Googlebot is allowed.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-02
Shop developers should first keep core feed and markup values (price, availability, brand, GTIN) accurate, then add Q&As, product highlights, specs as key-value product details and related products in the Merchant Center feed, and mirror them in schema.org Product markup only as Google documents support for it.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Content teams can feed the new Q&A attribute from real customer questions (support tickets, reviews, sales chats), answered factually per product; this is the detailed, merchant-owned data Google said AI shopping answers need.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google added six Merchant Center feed attributes for AI shopping experiences: question and answer, documents, related products, item group title and variant option for variants, and popularity rank.
More shopping structured data news was left for a Day 3 talk by a Google colleague, Alex.
Google Shopping called rich data with light structure the AI sweet spot: a little structure that helps the AI system understand the data, not deep, highly nested, complex structures.
Describing every semantic detail of a page in markup is probably not worth the effort; focus on the structured data that Google or other consumers actually use.
Google Shopping uses its own crawler, Storebot (Storebot-Google), instead of Googlebot because it needs fresh product information, prices, availability and shipping details and therefore crawls much more often.
The scheduler is shared infrastructure that decides what to fetch and when and sends URLs to the crawler. Each team decides the scheduling parameters for its own user agents.
Google works to make sure that what merchants can express in its shopping feeds can also be expressed in schema.org, adding vocabulary where schema.org lacks it, for example for product details.
Google's structured data speaker said that in the months before the event Google added support for validity dates on sale prices in product structured data, so merchants no longer need to rush to remove a sale price when the sale ends for fear it shows wrongly in snippets.
Rests on 13 claims, 13 of them in this topic
Rests on 9 claims, 8 of them in this topic
Let Storebot-Google crawl product, cart and checkout pages, through robots.txt and bot protection
Rests on 6 claims, 6 of them in this topic
Treat product Q&A and specification markup in schema.org as an extra on top of the feed
Rests on 6 claims, 2 of them in this topic